t. j.

clark

ORIGINS OF THE

PRESENT CRISIS

I
have been reading Perry Anderson’s descriptions of the state
we are in, and his efforts to discover the whys and wherefores of
that state—its origins, as he unrepentantly puts it—for thirty-five
years. I can see the pale yellow cover of the copy of NLR contain-
ing his early essay, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, in my mind’s eye as
I write; the colour plunges me back immediately, vividly, into the mix
of feelings that the essay stirred up the first time I read it. The stakes
were high then, or so we thought; and the disagreements deep—about
how to frame an explanation of the crisis that, in 1964, was unexpectedly
upon us; and, above all, about how to frame an effective response. In
what follows I want to talk about Anderson’s recent work The Origins of
Postmodernity and its treatment of art—especially, its characterization of
modernism and its account of the circumstances in which modernism
came to an end.1 I want to avoid another version of the ‘Does post-
modernism deserve the name?’ debate, which I am sure has been mostly
sterile. The fact that it is now fashionable to answer No to the question
is no more significant than the fact that five years ago it was hard not
to answer Yes. The question may turn out to have been the wrong one
all along. Maybe it was the wrong one because it necessarily pointed to
too many, too disparate phenomena at once—too many instances and
levels—with no stable sense of separations and determinations among
them. Or maybe that instability was its strength—the structure of the
investigation taking, and giving form to, the special necessities of the
matters being grappled with.

new left review 2 mar apr 2000 85

I do not know. I want to try to remain an agnostic on this question.
All I assume is that we want a set of descriptions that goes some way
to accounting for some specific turn—some rearrangement of features,
maybe some deeper shift in presuppositions and procedures—in the
visual and verbal culture of the past thirty years. And I assume that this
turn has to do with modernism—with turning it, or turning it against
itself, or turning away from it (but even that turning away is not fully
conceivable except as something done to a past that tries to prevent its
happening, still insists on facing the turning away, still wants the post- as
its own posterity). So a great deal depends, it follows, on getting modern-
ism right; on pointing to what it is in modernism that postmodernism
still has to do with, like it or not; and finally, crucially, what it was about
the circumstances of modernism that changed, some time in the 1950s
and 1960s—Anderson says ‘[it] was not until the turn of the seventies
that the ground for an altogether new configuration was prepared’—
enough for the older configuration’s hold, its continual facing ahead, to
relax.

Here, to remind you, are the lineaments of modernism as Anderson

presents them. He has in mind primarily the European modernisms of
the fin de siècle and the first thirty-or-so years of the last century. They are
best understood, he says,

as the outcome of a field of force triangulated by three coordinates: an

economy and society still only semi-industrial, in which the ruling order
remained to a significant extent agrarian or aristocratic; a technology of
dramatic interventions, whose impact was still fresh or incipient; and an
open political horizon, in which revolutionary upheavals of one kind or
another against the prevailing order were widely expected or feared. In the
space so bounded, a wide variety of artistic innovations could explode—
symbolism, imagism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism:
some quarrying classical memory or patrician styles, others drawn to a
poetics of the new machinery, yet others fired by visions of social upheaval;
but none at peace with the market as the organizing principle of a modern
culture—in that sense, virtually without exception anti-bourgeois.2

Anderson has interesting things to say by way of qualifying this broad

characterization. He builds in a sense of geographical differences and

1
Originally presented as a paper at a symposium of the Centre for Social Theory
and Comparative History at UCLA.
2
Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, Verso: London 1998, p. 81.

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exceptions—notably (as usual) he recognizes the peculiarity of the
English. He no longer believes that it was all up with modernism in
1945—the strange career of post-Surrealist, post-Expressionist avant-
gardism in New York, and even Paris and Copenhagen, in the 1950s now
looks more convincingly a part of modernism (less a last gasp or rote
repetition) than it did to him fifteen years ago. But he sticks to the main
lines of his picture, particularly of modernism’s enabling conditions: a
bourgeois industrial order existing cheek-by-jowl with its outmoded but
stubborn opposites—the village, the peasant, the dense cultural remains
of aristocracy; an arriving world of mechanical wonders still, in its very
newness and incompleteness, invested with the ‘charisma of technique’;
and the presence of revolution, as an actuality or a pervasive myth.

Modernism’s end

His account of modernism’s disabling conditions seems to me to follow

rather closely from this previous account. Postmodernism is again a field
‘triangulated . . . by three new historical coordinates’. Modernism was
the product of a bourgeois society in which a bourgeoisie still struggled
for cultural self-definition in face of its feudal, aristocratic other; one
in which the sheer extremity of that struggle for self-definition forced
the bourgeoisie to declare itself as a specific locus of cultural authority.
One thinks of Barthes’s great normative definition of the bourgeoisie as
‘the class that does not wish to be named’, and realizes that Anderson is
painting a picture of a necessarily exceptional and transient moment of
the bourgeoisie’s self-positing. Postmodernism happens when that self-
positing comes to an end—when ‘the bourgeoisie as Baudelaire or Marx,
Ibsen or Rimbaud, Grosz or Brecht—or even Sartre or O’Hara—knew it,
is a thing of the past.’3 This begins with a vengeance after 1945—though
the way had certainly been prepared by Fascism. And once ‘democratiza-
tion of manners and disinhibition of mores’ have really done their work
of symbolic pseudo-levelling, once ‘a general encanaillement of the pos-
sessing classes’ has overtaken the older, embarrassing, Bourdieu-type
signs of distinction, the game, for modernism, is up. It has no adversary.
Its endless riffs and deformations of the aristocratic legacy—the very
legacy the bourgeoisie was struggling at the same time to turn to its own
purposes—came to mean nothing, to have less and less critical force,

3
Origins, pp. 85–6.

clark: Postmodernism 87
because the bourgeoisie had abandoned the struggle, and finally settled
(as it always wanted to) for purely instrumental reason.

Thus coordinate one. Coordinate two is the routinization of technique,

and the saturation—the internal structuring—of the cultural field by
‘perpetual emotion machines, transmitting discourses that are wall-to-
wall ideology, in the strong sense of the term.’4 Television is the key
technology here: and still, curiously, the matrix of the new apparatus of
symbol management, and self-management via the symbol. Call this the
colonization of everyday life—the arrival of the society of the spectacle.
Where once the nature of bourgeois rationality had been congealed into
specific pieces or dreams of equipment—specific invasions of the body
or the landscape by this or that network or instrument, monstrous or
wonderful or most likely a mixture of both—now the new nature was
everywhere and nowhere, producing the very forms in which it would be
conceivable. There was no outside to the imaginary any more; or rather,
no inside—no critical distance possible in the space between its terms.
‘Image’, ‘body’, ‘landscape’, ‘machine’—these (and other) key terms of
modernism’s opposing language are robbed of their criticality by the
sheer rapidity of their circulation in the new image-circuits, and the abil-
ity of those circuits to blur distinctions, to flatten and derealize, to turn
every idea or delight or horror into a fifteen-second vignette.

Coordinate one: the new nature of class power. Coordinate two: the
new nature of its technical instrumentation. Coordinate three (does this
follow from the other two, or is it a coordinate with its own specific his-
tory and force?): ‘the cancellation of political alternatives’—the end of
the long epoch of revolutionary myths and challenges to bourgeois soci-
ety on which modernism had fed.

Politics of the spectacle

You will gather from the way I have presented this argument that there
is a lot of it I agree with. Some of its stresses—particularly on the neces-
sity of coming to terms with the new forces and relations of symbolic
production in bourgeois society, and their implications for a future anti-
capitalist politics—have seemed to me essential to thinking again about

4
Origins, p. 89.

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capitalism ever since they were first formulated, and I encountered them,
in the mid-1960s. If I may sound, very briefly, a micro-historical note
(bringing us back for a moment to the world of ‘Origins of the Present
Crisis’, etc.), it strikes me as odd that Anderson leans as heavily as he
does—and inevitably, rightly so—on the concept of ‘the society of the
spectacle’ while never naming its author (in a book where names are
named insistently), and choosing to dismiss the particular context of rev-
olutionary theory and practice from which the concept emerged—that
is, the later Situationist International—as ‘condemn[ed] to the hazards,
and transience, of any overpoliticization.’5 This indeed revives the mixed
feelings with which I read New Left Review in 1964. For the ‘overpoliti-
cization’ struck me then as simply a politicization, of a group of people
(some of them previously ‘artists’) whose encounter with the conditions
of production of the image, and the nature of the changes overtaking
that production, had led them to realize that the realm of the image
was, increasingly, the social location in which and against which a pos-
sible future ‘politics’ would have to be framed. That the politicization
resulting from this had its febrile and precarious sides, no one but a fool
would deny. But part of the reason for that extremity, I am sure, was
isolation—that is, the refusal of most of the rest of the Left at the time to
entertain the idea that the ground and form of the ‘political’ was shifting,
maybe terminally, in ways that put the Left’s most basic assumptions in
doubt.

The origins of postmodernity were a matter of active theory and prac-

tice, then—and of active avoidance and choosing not to notice—at
the moment of origins. The valedictory, hard-headed, anti-denunci-
atory, ‘own-up-to-the-power-of-the-image’ tone of much writing on
postmodernism—including Jameson’s, at moments—would be easier
to warm to if it were not so decidedly a realism after the event.

Enough. My subject here had better be modernism, not the society of

the spectacle. I have various, overlapping things to say about Anderson’s
characterization of it, and no very clear sense of the order they should
go in—or of whether what seem to me various different things will turn
out to be just different ways of saying the same thing. Plenty of previous

5
Origins, p. 84. For more on these issues see D. Nicholson-Smith and T. J. Clark,
‘Why Art Can’t Kill The Situationist International’, October, no. 79, winter 1997.

clark: Postmodernism 89
commentators, including Alex Callinicos, have pointed out that descrip-
tions of postmodernism almost invariably thrive on a kind of blindness
to the presence within modernism of the very features that are supposed
to make postmodernism what it is. ‘Virtually every aesthetic device or
feature attributed to postmodernism—bricolage of tradition, play with
the popular, reflexivity, hybridity, pastiche, figurality, decentering of the
subject—could be found’, as Anderson puts it, in the previous regime of
representation. ‘No critical break was discernible.’6

I want to push this line of analysis further. For of course (as Callinicos
realizes) it is no kind of answer to the argument for postmodernism’s
specificity simply to list those features it shares with its predecessor. Any
new regime of representation will be made out of the debris—the unreal-
ized capacities, the opportunities offered for reinflection and reversal—of
the regime it displaces. Again, the example of the bourgeoisie’s long
(for a while, it seemed truly interminable) love-hate relationship with
the forms of aristocracy comes to mind. It is still open to us to say that
finally, or sufficiently, those features borrowed and travestied from the
predecessor crystallize into a genuinely new order. They are put to new
purposes. Their problems and objects are recognizably different.

So the only sufficient answer to Anderson and Jameson would turn on

a demonstration not just that modernism and postmodernism share
‘devices and features’, but that their purposes, problems and objects are
essentially the same—they stand in the same central, undecidable rela-
tion of ambivalence toward the main forms of modernity, of bourgeois
industrial society. I am inclined to think this is true. Remember, as a
preliminary orientation, that Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle was
not a book that proposed a periodization of capitalism. It deliberately did
not say when ‘the spectacle’ arrived. The spectacle was a logic and an
instrumentation inherent in the commodity economy, and in certain
of its social accompaniments, from the very beginning. No doubt that
logic became clearer as the instrumentation became more efficient and
widespread—why else the peculiar mixture of lucidity and desperation
to Debord’s very tone? But the logic had always been relatively clear, and
the instrumentation notable—in a sense, pervasive. Why else The Society
of the Spectacle’s epigraph from Feuerbach? What else did its author think
Marx was pointing to in his account of ‘the fetishism of commodities’?

6
Origins, p. 80.

90 nlr 2
Modernism, to repeat, was already characterized by a deep, truly unde-
cidable doubleness of mind in the face of the main forms of modernity.
And that doubleness was constitutive; since modernism is a name not
for a stance of Left or Right insurgency or negation, but for a pattern of
artistic practice in which modernity’s very means of representation—the
structure of symbolic production and reproduction within it—are put to
the test of exemplification in a particular medium. That is to say, one can
never be certain of modernism’s ‘attitude’ to the appearance and logic
of modernity because modernism itself was never certain—because it
could not have put modernity to the test in the way it did without bracket-
ing overall ‘judgement’ of what it took on until such judgement was given
in the act (the whole structure) of representation itself. Certainly Adorno’s
great ‘Teach the petrified forms how to dance by singing them their
own song’ is modernism’s motto. But for that very reason it is always
the question with modernism whether the process of singing will pet-
rify the singer, or lead (as it were, at the very moment of petrification, at
the moment when modernism’s technicality is about to become the full
mirror-image of technical rationality in general) to a discovery of the
joints and sutures in the stone. So that the statues—the forms, the fet-
ishes—do finally creak into motion.

Testing representations

Modernism was a form of testing—of modernity and its modes. The

modes were put to the test by being materialized, by being reduced to a
set of actual, technical manoeuvres; but more than that, by being forced
and denatured in the process, in order to see how much of the modes
survived the extremes of dispersal and emptying, flattening and abstrac-
tion, estrangement and de-skilling—the procedures that strangely, in
modernism, became what materialization was. Modernism was forcing, in
other words; and, needless to say, that forcing had its moment of freez-
ing and idealizing—what Adorno called its regressive moment—as the
necessary other to the annihilating or abysmal ones. Take the motif of
the machine and the mechanized (and beyond it the wider problematic
of rationalization and standardization) which Anderson rightly recog-
nizes as central. Is it the case, as he takes it to be, that modernism
necessarily posited the machine as an arriving, transforming entity, as
opposed to the sign of a wider, previously embedded logic? Did modern-
ism always fall prey to the charisma of technique (even the charisma
of its own technique)? I wonder. For every Ozenfant there seems to me

clark: Postmodernism 91
to be a Picabia; for every Schröder House an Einstein Tower; for every
Monument to the Third International a Merzbau enfolding its Cathedral
of Erotic Misery—or indeed, directly answering Tatlin’s Monument,
Hausmann’s sardonic-domestic Tatlin at Home. That is to say, for every
sweet dream of rationality, a nightmare vision of the iron cage. For every
smug act of gloating at a decentered, pseudo-mechanical subject in the
making (much of mid-period Duchamp comes to mind), a Kafka to give
us the actual, syntactical movement—the movement of horror and self-
loss—of an ordinary ‘modern’ individual on his or her way to living
death. For every De Stijl a Dada; or a De Stijl going Dada (discovering
Dada at the heart of De Stijl); or a Dada forced, seemingly by the logic of
its own hyper-individualism, toward a weird parody—but in the end is
it even a parody?—of Constructivism. I am describing actual trajectories
here, actual hybrids at the heart of modernism: Schwitters, for instance,
or El Lissitzky, or Van Doesburg.

The invisible bourgeoisie

You see, I hope, where my argument is going. The closer I look at

modernism, the more I come to doubt the picture of its relation to the
charisma of the machine on which Anderson’s coordinate two depends.
On one level this is a matter of empirical disagreement about this or that
modernist artifact or frame of belief. And the same kind of factual argu-
ments could be brought to bear on the other two points of Anderson’s
triangulation. Maybe the postwar period really did see a specific levelling
and dis-identification of the bourgeoisie. Anderson’s language is vivid
and persuasive about the detail of that disappearance. But was such a dis-
appearance constitutively new? Did it mean modernism was face to face
with a subject—a social formation—it had previously never had in its
sights? I doubt it. Again, I go back to Barthes’s definition—to the notion
of the bourgeoisie as, by its very nature as a class, a constant flickering
in and out of social visibility, a permanent, endlessly inventive société
anonyme. I would say that Barthes was on to something fundamental
here, which theorists of capitalist culture have not yet fully pursued.
And the presence or absence of the bourgeoisie—its positivity but deep
concealment—is one of modernism’s defining, indeed constitutive, sub-
jects, from A Burial at Ornans and Bouvard et Pécuchet on. For what
was modernity except that set of forms in which a certain ruling class
attempted to universalize its power, by having that power simply be indi-
vidual freedom, or technical rationality, or the one as condition of the

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other? And what else is modernism but a continual encounter with just
that effect of representation? Is it even the case—I move on to coordinate
three—that the end of effective political opposition to capitalism robbed
modernism of one of its necessary supports? Had modernism not con-
stantly (again, constitutively) lived precisely with such an ending? Did it
not thrive, in France at the turn of the century, in the face of bourgeois
society’s most hideous positivity? And did it not feed deep, exactly in its
pre-war heyday, on the worst kinds of Rightist vitalism, mysticism and
racism? (Far more deeply, as I see it, by 1910–14, than ever it had fed
on Kropotkin or Jules Guesde.) In what sense were the years between
the two great wars not already an ending—a crushing and freezing of
revolutionary energies? I know that Anderson and I are never going to
agree about whether the Communism of the Third International lives
up to that last description. But we can agree that modernism—actual
modernists—disagreed about exactly this issue, this sense of modern-
ism’s political situation, as the Communism of the Third International
went through its various loathsome mutations. For every Léger there
was a Jean Vigo, for every El Lissitzky a Malevich, for every Heartfield
an Attila Jószef. And is not the point about modernism, once again, that
in practice even the work of Stalinism’s great modernist camp-followers
opened the immobility and flatness of the Third International’s image
of socialism to scrutiny—to possible dismantling and remaking? Do
not El Lissitzky’s absurd, marmoreal photomontages of the 1930s, or
Heartfield’s desperate parallel efforts to dislodge Hitler and celebrate the
Soviet New Man, or even Frida Kahlo’s last mad, pathetic attempts at
an overt Stalinist icon: do not all of these speak to the very crushing and
fixing of possibilities they try to negate?

Continuities

Again, I return to the wider logic of the case. It is not an answer to the
idea of postmodernism simply to say that the modernist field contained
many of the same procedures and proposals. The question is: Were
those procedures and proposals formative? Were they already what gave
modernism its shape, its dynamic? None of my counterexamples would
matter, in other words, if I did not believe they added up, finally, to
another account of modernism’s whole situation. By ‘situation’ I mean
not just the movement’s undecidable social place in relation to a visible-
and-invisible bourgeoisie (whose visibility and invisibility it continually
chose to recognize and not recognize), but also, more deeply, its sense

clark: Postmodernism 93
of the means at its disposal in the face of modernity—what it had to do,
what technical or material logic it had to follow, what political or critical
vantage point it might have to deny itself, to keep the possibility of repre-
sentation alive. To put it in a nutshell (to speak to the founding father)
I do not see that Warhol’s ascesis of ‘attitude’, or collapse of distance,
or atony or impenetrability, does other than continue a tactic—but it is
more than a tactic, it is a structural necessity—that had made modern-
ism what it was.

Once or twice in his recent essays Fredric Jameson has turned specifi-
cally to defining modernism, and not surprisingly he has gone back to
Adorno for help—to Adorno and Hegel. ‘For us,’ he quotes Hegel’s great
dictum, ‘art no longer counts as the highest mode in which truth fash-
ions an existence for itself.’ The task of the critic, Jameson says, is to
understand why the prediction about art practice that seemed to follow
from the dictum—that art, as a significant form of life, would end, or
decline into mere decorative accompaniment—did not prove to be true.
Something called modernism happened instead. ‘What did not conform
to Hegel’s prognosis was the supersession of art by philosophy itself:
rather, a new and different kind of art appeared to take philosophy’s
place after the end of the old one, and to usurp all of philosophy’s claims
to the Absolute, to being “the highest mode in which truth manages to
come into being”. This was the art we call modernism.’7 Or again, in
‘Transformations of the Image’,

what distinguishes modernism in general is not the experimentation with

inherited forms or the invention of new ones . . . Modernism constitutes,
above all, the feeling that the aesthetic can only fully be realized and embod-
ied where it is something more than the aesthetic . . . [It is] an art that in
its very inner movement seeks to transcend itself as art (as Adorno thought,
and without it being particularly important to determine the direction of
that self-transcendence, whether religious or political).8

These are key episodes in Jameson’s text. Very often the moments at
which he returns specifically to Adorno are those where the stakes of
his whole analysis come clear. And these recent ones are clarifying.
They allow me to state my basic disagreement with Jameson’s picture of
modernism and whatever happened to it in the last thirty years—with

7
Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn, London 1998, p. 83.
8
Ibid., p. 101–2.

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Jameson’s picture, and, I think, Anderson’s. For the stress here on mod-
ernism as turning on a repeated claim, or effort, to transcend itself as
art—its belief, to quote Jameson again, ‘that in order to be art at all, art
must be something beyond art’9—seems to me exactly half the story. It
is, if you like, a stress out of Adorno’s dialectic, which leaves unspoken—
and therefore in the end demotes—the other, equally essential moment
to Adorno’s account. For surely transcendence in modernism can only
be achieved—is not this central to our whole sense of the movement’s
wager?—by way of absolute immanence and contingency, through a
deep and ruthless materialism, by a secularization (a ‘realization’) of
transcendence—an absorption in the logic of form. Jameson’s modern-
ism, that is to say, seems to me posited as a movement of transcendence
always awaiting another, a distinct, movement (indeed, moment) at
which there will take place, punctually, ‘the dissolution of art’s vocation
to reach the Absolute’.10 And this great, ultra-Enlightenment imagining
of disabusal, of the stars coming down to earth, is of course what gives
Jameson’s vision its force. But supposing (as I think Adorno supposed)
that modernism was already that dissolution and disabusal—but exactly
a dissolution held in dialectical tension with the idea or urge to totality,
which idea or impulsion alone gave the notion of dissolution (or emptying,
or ascesis, or fragment, or mere manufacture, or reduction, or deadpan,
or non-identity) sense.

From this picture of modernism there would follow, I feel, a different

appraisal of the last thirty years. I guess it would turn on the question
of whether, or to what extent, the figures of dissolution and disabusal in
art practice—the familiar figures I have just listed—became themselves a
form of transcendence; and, as always within modernism, a transcend-
ence doomed to collapse. Or rather, not so much ‘doomed to collapse’
as simply to be confronted again with the pathos lying at the heart of
disabusal—disabusal (true secularization) as one more aesthetic mirage
among others, always looming ahead of modernism in the commodity
desert, as a form of lucidity it never quite reaches. Warhol, inevitably,
is for me increasingly the figure of this. How handmade and petty-bour-
geois his bright world of consumer durables now looks! How haunted
still by a dream of freedom! So that his Campbell’s Soup Can appears,
thirty years on, transparently an amalgam—an unresolved, but naively

9
The Cultural Turn, p. 83.
10
Ibid., p. 84.

clark: Postmodernism 95
serious dialectical mapping—of De Stijl-type abstraction onto a found-
ing, consoling, redemptive country-store solidity. How like a Stuart Davis
or a Ralston Crawford it looks, or an entry from the Dictionnaire des
Idées Reçues! ‘History has many cunning passages,’ to quote Gerontion,
‘contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions.’
Does Warhol come to seem more and more a modernist because it turns
out that what he inaugurated was another of modernism’s cycles? Or
because what happened next was truly an ending, an exit, from which
we inevitably look back on the pioneers and see them as touching primi-
tives, still half in love with the art they are putting to death? I suspect the
former. It could be the latter. Neither conclusion is comforting. Thirty
years is not enough time to tell.

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